The present invention relates to the field of manufacturing head suspensions for magnetic disk drives, more particularly, to adjusting the spring rate for load beams used in such head suspensions. The present invention overcomes shortcomings in the prior art by initially providing a spring region with a plurality of bridges or frets with an initial spring rate greater than a desired spring rate and subsequently adjusting the number of bridges in the spring region of the load beam to approach or equal the desired spring rate and thus reduce the variability in the spring rate of such load beams.